Kalahari Desert, Botswana
A vast desert wilderness across Botswana: the Central Kalahari and Kgalagadi reserves, home to lions, cheetah and antelope amid dunes and grasslands.
It is hard to picture the Kalahari without a Lion King image surfacing, and the desert, stretching across Botswana, Namibia and South Africa, rather lives up to it. Dotted with national parks and protected reserves, it is a haven for an extraordinary spread of wildlife.
The full cast turns up here: lions, naturally, along with cackling hyenas, elegant antelope and the elusive cheetah. But the landscape is its own draw. Rolling red dunes, fossilised river valleys and stretches of grassland make the Kalahari feel like a microcosm of the African continent itself: vast, varied and quietly dramatic.
That scale is the one thing to plan around. The region is far too immense to be squeezed into a single safari, so it pays to choose a focus. The Central Kalahari Game Reserve, in Botswana, is a superb introduction; the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park offers another scenic slice of this singular land, straddling the South African border.
The safaris themselves span every register, from honeymoon-tour comfort to barefoot-luxury camps, which means most travellers can find a way into the desert that suits them.
For travellers who want a wilder, quieter counterpoint to the classic bush safari (somewhere defined by space and silence as much as wildlife), the Kalahari is an unforgettable choice, and one of southern Africa’s great landscapes.
